Hamlet and the Word
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Abstract
Hamlet has been such a mystery as Sir Philip speaks of—the mystery of its hero as a man and of its meaning as a poem. Within the play-poem itself is the mystery's motive and aura: the motive, as Francis Fergusson has said, of finding and destroying the "hidden imposthume" poisoning Claudius' Denmark, and the aura, to nearly everyone in the play, of Hamlet's inscrutable language of gesture and word. Those who have felt that Shakespeare is hiding occult truths under his surfaces of words, though they may not be sure what the truths are, have been right in their feeling about the nature of Hamlet in particular. For what it is, in addition to being "about" a multiplicity of things, is an articulation of the mystery of the Word in the country of profanation.